Amadís de Gaula is a chivalric romance that became a bestseller and major entertainment franchise in sixteenth-century Spain. In 1508 Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published what would be the first of a multiple-volume series of the adventures of Amadis of Gaul and his numerous successors. It spawned a wildly successful (and widely critcized) genre of popular novel that famously met its demise at the hands of Miguel de Cervantes, who mercilessly parodied the books in the figure of Don Quijote. The novel was perhaps the most important exemplar of the Spanish chivalric imagination, an iconic brand or franchise that was instantly recognizable as Spanish. It was a natural favorite for Sephardic Jews who, while living in Constantinople, Salonika, or elsewhere, spoke Spanish and still identified strongly with the vernacular culture of their land of origin. Its reception by Sephardic Jews and its translation into Hebrew offers us a glimpse into the literary practices of the Sephardic diaspora. The Hebrew Amadís can help us to better understand the diasporic cultural production of the Sephardim.

And when we say ‘diaspora,’ what do we mean? I’ve written in another post on the idea of ‘double diaspora,’ that the Sephardim (Spanish Jews) experienced not only the diaspora from their Biblical homeland, which I will call ‘Zion’ but also a diaspora from Sefarad (Spain). They experienced —and gave voice to— the separation from their ancestral land of Sefarad in terms both real and symbolic, and their cultural production in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere in the Sephardic diaspora should be understood in light of this fact.

Why does this matter when we are studying the cultural significance of a translation? It matters because in doing so we are expanding the discussion of Jewish diaspora. First-wave modern theorists of diaspora writing in the 1970s and 1980s argued that the cultural imagination of diasporic populations vacillate between two geographical territories, constantly mediating between the symbolic value of their homeland and the lived reality of their current hostland. Later theorists of more recent diasporas have criticized this ‘dual-territorial’ model. Sudesh Mishra, one of the harshest critics of this approach, argues that it cannot address the complexities of the modern diasporas of Indian, African, Chinese, and other populations.

This discussion has prompted historians and theorists of Jewish diaspora take a second look at how they think about Jewish history and culture in diaspora. The concept of ‘double diaspora’ attempts to account for some of this complexity by studying the cultural production of the Sephardim in and beyond Spain as giving voice to two overlaid layers of diaspora that interact, and in the words of Jonathan Boyarin, “echo back and forth” in the Sephardic cultural imagination.

Ottoman Jewish print culture

Before examining the text of the translation itself it is worth considering Algaba’s Hebrew Amadís in the context of the Hebrew print culture and of the Ottoman Jewish society of the times. The Hebrew print industry was active in Spain from the late fifteenth century, and presses in Spain produced a great number of religious works (Bibles, Talmuds, Biblical commentaries, liturgical and moralistic texts, etc.) but also volumes of philosophy, science, and what we might call secular prose such as histories and fiction. In the early sixteenth century Hebrew printing continued to flourish first in Italy and then in Ottoman cities such as Salonika, Adrianopole, and Constantinople.

For most of the sixteenth century nearly all titles with any discernible Jewish content were published in Hebrew (in Salonika printers brought out a few titles in Judeo-Spanish, and Italian printers published some in Italian or in both Italian and Hebrew) but for the most part Hebrew had pride of place as the prestige language of the Jewish press. However, Jewish printers in Italy and the Ottoman Empire were not culturally isolated or closed to the vernacular and learned languages of their non-Jewish neighbors. On the contrary, the itinerant printer Gershon Soncino (who moved his press a number of times to various locations in Italy and the Ottoman Empire) published a number of titles for Christian patrons in Italian, Greek, and Latin. Apparently, the Greek vernacular culture of the Ottoman Romaniote Jews did not have sufficient caché to warrant repackaging in Hebrew. Constantinople Jews were not commonly very proficient in Turkish in the sixteenth century, and in any event the Ottomans did not license Turkish-language printing until the mid-eighteenth century, so that option was not on the table for Soncino.

In Ottoman Jewish society, Hebrew was the academic and religious lingua franca of a number of different ethnic groups who had settled in Ottoman cities. While Salonika in the sixteenth century was overwhelmingly Sephardic, the indigenous Greek-Speaking Romaniote Jews had significant communities in the cities and were joined by Ashkenazi Jews from Western and Eastern Europe as well as some Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews from the Arabic, Persian, and Turkic-speaking areas of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. But by their numbers, their superior cultural level, and their considerable network of commercial and diplomatic contacts, the Sephardim quickly emerged as the prestige subculture of Ottoman Jewry. This, along with the fact that Sephardim conversant in Spanish would have no need of a Hebrew translation in order to read Amadís, suggests that the translation was made either for Greek-speaking (but Hebrew-reading) Romaniote Jews in Ottoman lands or perhaps for non-Spanish-speaking Jewish readers in any country that Algaba’s edition might eventually reach. At this time Jewish merchants, diplomats, and scholars traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. While he have no documentary evidence of the reception of Algaba’s translation, it is not unreasonable to think that copies may have ended up in the hands of readers in Cairo, Tunis, Venice, Troyes, or Cochin for that matter.

Sephardic culture (in the broad sense) had long history of prestige in the East, going back to Maimonides, who retained the sobriquet ‘Ha-Sefardí’ long after leaving his native Cordoba. The Ottoman Sephardim likewise represented this prestige, expressed both in their Spanish vernacular culture and in the wealth and influence they wielded. Accordingly, the Sephardic community attracted and assimilated members from the other groups, and soon was the dominant ethnic culture in Ottoman Jewish society. As we read Algaba’s text we should keep two things in mind: he was in all likelihood writing for non-Sephardic Jews, and he was consciously representing Sephardic culture to them in choosing to translate a Spanish (European) novel, a genre that had yet to be introduced to Hebrew.

The task of Algaba’s Amadís

Let us how turn to the text and see how Algaba worked with Montalvo’s text to appeal to Jewish audiences and (it must be said) to sell copies of his translation. One common strategy of Algaba is to de-Christianize the text, removing references that might offend Jewish sensibilities. It is noteworthy that in most of these cases he avoids substituting specifically Jewish terms or concepts. Algaba’s Amadís is the first major narrative work in a register of Hebrew that is largely free of the dense weave of clever Biblical and rabbinical allusions that was characteristic of nearly every other work of Hebrew prose being published at the time (Judah al-Harizi’s Tahkemoni, Judah ibn Shabbetay’s Offering of Judah, Vidal Benvenist’s Tale of Efer and Dina, etc.)

The Anchorite, by Teodor Axentowicz (1859–1938)

In Algaba’s translation, priests become laymen, oaths are secularized, and moralizing digressions (to which Montalvo was famously inclined) are simply omitted. Most of these examples are superficial and predictable. When Amadís exclaims “¡Sancta María!” Algaba substitutes ‘Long live my Lord the King!’ Montalvo has the Queen lead Amadís into her “capilla” (chapel), which Algaba renders as “cámara” (chamber). Elsewhere, Amadís comes upon a wounded knight in the road who asks to be taken to an “hermitaño” (Anchorite) who might ‘tend to his soul,’ which Algaba renders as ‘someone who might heal me.’

Occasionally Algaba changes the moral valence of a term that is not specifically Christian but that might have been unseemly to Montalvo’s target readership. Montalvo describes the inaugural sexual encounter between Amadís and Oriana, for example, as “vicio y plazer” (‘vice and pleasure’), which Algaba renders as ‘delight and happiness.’ When Amadís comes upon a damsel who has been sexually assaulted, in Montalvo’s version she relates that she was “escarnecida” (‘dishonored’) by her attacker, while Algaba’s damsel simply says: “he lay with me.”

Most of the examples of Algaba’s de-christianization of the text are similarly routine; but some merit interpretation. When King Languines orders a traitorous woman burnt to death, Algaba instead has her thrown to her death from a high tower. His reluctance to depict her being burned may be out of respect to victims of the Spanish Inquisition. His alternative may be dawn from Josephus: in the Sefer Yosippon, the medieval Hebrew translation of Josephus’ history, Jezebel meets a similar fate as punishment for her sins.

Despite his secularizing tendency, there are some moments in which he (for lack of a better, less-charged term) ‘Judaizes’ the text, inserting references to Jewish texts, cultural concepts, and observances. A few of these replace Christian references, but many appear to be spontaneous, whether out of a desire to appeal to his audience or, occasionally, for ironic effect. When Amadís’ step-brother Galaor bids farewell to the giant who raised him on a remote island, the giant asks “que le huviesse memoria” (‘that he remember him’); in the Hebrew takes a more spiritual turn and asks that ‘he not be forgotten from his prayers.’

In particularly playful rabbinical allusion, Amadís deals his enemy a crippling blow to the thigh. In addition to the direct translation for thigh (yareakh) Algaba adds a technical term drawn from the rabbinic discourse on koshering animal carcasses: maqom tsomet hagidin, ‘the place where the tendons come together.’ This is Algaba’s ironic response to the episode in Genesis where the angel, tired of wrestling with Jacob all night long, finally “wrenched Jacob’s hip at the socket” (32: 26). The Biblical text then explains “that is why the children of Israel to this day do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the socket of the hip [i.e. sirloin, top loin, etc.], since Jacob’s hip socket was wrenched at the thigh muscle” (32:33). Where the Biblical texts derives its dietary ruling from the battle between Jacob and the angel, Algaba playfully writes the language of dietary restriction back into the battle between Amadís and his opponent.

Sephardic chivalry and courtly discourse

Perhaps most significant for our discussion is Algaba’s interpretation of Montalvo’s frequent references to the chivalric and courtly cultural world represented in Amadís. It stands to reason that non-Sephardic Jews, who had never lived in Christian Europe would be unfamiliar with the institutions and practices of chivalry that form the fabric of the social world of Amadís. You cannot, of course, trade on foreign caché that is totally incomprehensible to your audience. To this end Algaba tailors Montalvo’s references to the institutions of chivalry, social conventions, and courtly practices that may have fallen outside the experience of his non-Sephardic readers. As in the examples of de-Christianization, some such examples are superficial, but telling of differences of expectations of what ‘courtly’ or ‘chivalric’ might mean to non-Sephardic, Jewish audiences.

A character named ‘la doncella de la guirnalda’ (‘the damsel of the garland’), so named because she always wore a garland of flowers to accentuate her beautiful hair, becomes in Algaba’s version the ‘damsel of the crown,’ an accessory that ostensibly made more sense to the Ottoman readers to whom a garland of flowers might have seemed more rustic than idyllic. Algaba often renders declarations couched in elevated courtly language (which abound), in Biblical Hebrew, which better emphasizes their high register. When Amadís declares “¡muerto soy de corazón!” (I shall die of heartbreak!), Algaba renders mah anokhi, she-nitraf libi! (‘What will become of me, for my heart is torn asunder!’), deploying the rarer first-person pronoun anokhi found in the Hebrew Bible. When a rival knight mocks Amadís as unworthy to love Oriana, challenges Amadís to “tell me who she is, so that I may love her.” Algaba puts into his mouth the instantly recognizable words of the Song of Songs (6:10): haged na li mi ha-nishkafa-kemo shahar (‘who is she that shines through like the dawn’). Again Algaba shows a bit of playfulness in his ironic deployment of biblical language, emphasizing the intensity of the discussion between Amadís and his rival in a way that makes sense to his audience.

Algaba translates some of the specific conventions and practices of Spain’s chivalric culture into more familiar, general terms. When Amadís swears an oath of service to Helisenda, he does so “en esta cruz y espada con que la orden de cavallería recebí” (‘upon this cross and sword which I received with the Order of Chivalry’), referencing a specifically Christian, chivalric practice of swearing upon a sword planted point down so that the handle and guard resemble a cross. The reference to the Order of Chivalry would most likely be opaque, and swearing on the cross unacceptable to a Jewish audience. Algaba has him swear simply upon his sword as a kind of shorthand. When Helisena appeals to the honor of King Perión’s squire, she asks him if he is an hidalgo (nobleman of low rank); by this she means ‘are you an honorable individual with whom I can trust my secret?’ Algaba preserves the equation of high birth and good moral conduct implied by the word hidalgo but his Helisena asks the squire ‘who are you and your family? Are they high born? (me`olah, literally ‘superior’ or ‘fine’).

Cárcel de amor, Barcelona, Joan Rosembach 1493

Very occasionally, Algaba demonstrates his familiarity with courtly and chivalric discourse by introducing elements of them into the Hebrew when they are absent from the Spanish. In one such example, Amadís is complaining to Oriana about the difficulty of deferring his sexual desire for her. His complaint is couched in standard language of the courtly lover. He claims it is an impossible task, because his “juizio no puede resistir aquellos mortales deseos de quien cruelmente es atormentado” (‘better judgment cannot resist those mortal desires by which it is cruelly tormented’). What is interesting is that Algaba’s Hebrew rendering introduces a different trope of the courtly lover, one that is also characteristic of Montalvo’s day but that is absent from prior Hebrew tradition. He writes: “my heart is bound and tied in iron chains,” an image very much consistent with the late medieval Western European poetic convention of love as a form of slavery or imprisonment (Spanish books on amorous topics of the late fifteenth century included Siervo libre de amor ‘Free Slave of Love’ and Cárcel de amorPrison of Love). Here Algaba proves himself a knowledgeable reader of Spanish tradition who actively seeks to reconcile, integrate, and mediate between Hebrew and Spanish literary traditions. His insertion of this courtly trope speaks to his biculturality and more importantly to his role of translator mediating between diasporic communities, the Sephardim who represented the prestige of European courtly culture, and the Greek- and Arabic-speaking Jews who were his target audience.

Conclusion

Algaba’s translation project was ultimately a commercial failure. His translation of the first book of Montalvo’s Amadís was of very low quality, and for whatever reason did not appear to have stimulated demand for subsequent installments. We have no concrete data to explain this fact, but we may speculate. Perhaps the time had not yet come for ‘light literature’ in Hebrew. Algaba’s Amadís was certainly alone in that respect: it is the only Hebrew edition of its times of a popular novel. The other secular works that were published in the sixteenth century were more ‘serious’ literature: difficult rhyming prose narratives that were showy displays of erudition and arcana, histories of Jewish persecutions or of the regimes that persecuted them, and a smattering of philosphical and scientific works. Algaba’s test balloon novel was an aberration, and the European novel would not make a significant début in Hebrew until the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, Algaba’s Amadís does tell us a great deal about how he sought to represent Sephardic popular culture to the other communities of the Jewish diaspora in the Ottoman Empire of his day. His adaptation of Montalvo’s iconic work for a non-Sephardic Jewish audience is an illuminating example of how Sephardim chose to articulate their relationship with the land from which they found themselves in a second, Sephardic diaspora.

This is the slidecast from a Work in Progress talk I gave last week at the Oregon Humanities Center, where I was Ernest Moll Fellow in Literary Studies during Winter term 2011. You can also listen to the .mp3 here.

Popular audiences in Jewish communities across the world are practically addicted to images of Spanish Jewry’s “Golden Age.” The idea of a Jewish community that was rich, powerful, and intellectually talented has been pretty compelling to the modern Jewish imagination. That whole expulsion/inquisition thing at the end kind of messes things up, but we’ll leave that aside for the time being. As far as most modern Jews are concerned, Spain was the best keg party ever, and like most great keg parties, it got ugly at the end.

The point here is that for the most part, world Jewry is happy to claim the Sephardim as a shining example of Jewish cultural achievement. This was not really ever in question as long as I have been paying attention. But working as a Hispanist and reading a lot of studies by Spanish scholars on Spanish Jewish (Sephardic) topics, I began to wonder if Spain was also eager to claim the Sephardim as Spanish. One way to find out is to read what literary historians have to say about Jewish authors who lived and wrote in Spain.

In two recent posts I wrote about the medieval Sephardic poet Todros Abulafia (late 1200s) and some of his modern critics’ opinions of Abulafia’s troubadour-flavored poetry. In this post I would like to discuss a related case, that of the Sephardic author Shem Tov (‘Santob’) ben Isaac Ardutiel of Carrión (mid 1300s). Like Todros Abulafia, most Jewish authors at this time wrote almost exclusively in Hebrew. Many Jewish intellectuals translated works from Arabic and occasionally Hebrew into Spanish, Catalan, or Portuguese, but when they did their own work it was almost exclusively in Hebrew. As far as we know, Shem Tov Ardutiel is the only Jew of his time to write an original book in the vernacular, the Proverbios Morales (‘Moral Proverbs’).

The book is a collection of wise sayings in verse, an original work of what scholars like to call ‘wisdom literature,’ which during the Middle Ages was a well-cultivated genre. Medieval writers had good models for their books of wisdom literature in the Biblical Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, as well as Greek and Latin collections of philosophical musings, proverbs, aphorisms, and exemplary tales. Shem Tov’s Proverbios was an original, innovative work that incorporated a variety of sources from the bible, rabbinical literature, and folklore. It was not, however, in any way a Jewish text. That is, it did not cite either the Hebrew Bible or the Rabbis, and did not present any specifically Jewish lessons. It was basically a secular book of wisdom or popular philosophy, written in Castilian, the dialect that would eventually come to be called Spanish.

Without going into the question of why medieval Jews didn’t write original work in Spanish (though I write about it a little bit in here on pages 183-185), I would rather like to look at what Shem Tov’s Spanish readers had to say about this rare bird of a book, and whether they considered it (and him) to be, like them, Spanish.

A little caveat: in the 1300s, there was, strictly speaking, no ‘Spain.’ The idea of Spain as a nation state comes later, some say with the reign of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, some say even later. So to refer to any author writing in Toledo or Barcelona or Seville in 1300 as ‘Spanish’ is a convenient anachronism. Shem Tov was a subject of the Crown of Castile and León, and he probably considered himself to be sefardí, or a Jew from the Iberian Peninsula, but he had no notion of Spain as a modern nation state and could not have considered himself Spanish in that sense. My question is, do his Spanish readers consider him Spanish?

A while back I wrote an article titled “Is Spanish Hebrew literature ‘Spanish?’” in which I looked at what Spanish scholars of Hebrew had to say about the Hebrew literature written in Spain during the Middle Ages. Did they consider it to be part of their national heritage? Did they view the Jewish authors who wrote in Spain as part of their nation’s medieval past or where they part of a foreign culture that happened to live in Spain?

Like most questions, the answer depends on whom you ask. Shem Tov himself seems to have anticipated this problem, and in the introduction to his work he asked his readers not to judge his work by the religion of its author. He says that even if his book was written by a Jew, it’s still worthwhile. Can you imagine an American Jewish author writing these lines today?

The falcon is not worth less for having been born in a poor nest
nor the good proverbs for having been told by a Jew

Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana

So it seems Shem Tov imagined that Christian readers might think poorly of his work because of his religion. His fears were not always realized. Early on, Spanish literati praised the Proverbios. One of the most influential figures in the Spanish literary scene in the 1400s, the Marquis of Santillana, called Shem Tov a ‘very great troubadour poet’ (“muy grant trobador”).

In modern times, Shem Tov’s readers are divided on the question of the “Jewishness” or “Spanishness” of both the man and his book. As in the case of Todros Abulafia’s Israeli critics, a lot of this division is tied to contemporary politics and professional formation.

José Rodríguez de Castro, wrote during the late 1700s, when the Spanish Inquistion was still officially on the books (it was abolished in 1834). Like Santillana, he praises Shem Tov’s poetry, calling him ‘one of the most famous troubadour poets of his time’ (“uno de los Trobadores más célebres de su tiempo”). However, he also thought that Shem Tov was a converso, or a Jew converted to Christianity. It may not have been a good idea in Rodríguez de Castro’s day to celebrate a Jew as a great national poet.

On the other side of the aisle, the rather more conservative Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, perhaps the most influential intellectual of his time, exoticizes Shem Tov and places him outside of the national culture. Far outside:

[His work] has an oriental flavor so distinct, both in its language and its imagery, that at times it seems to have been written originally in Hebrew and later translated by its author into Castilian. . . . it is difficult to believe that this book, so profoundly Semitic, so denuded of all classical and Christian influences, might have been created in the Campos region of Castile.

Under Franco, this orientalizing of Shem Tov becomes the norm. In 1943 Juan Hurtado y Jiménez de la Serna writes of Shem Tov’s ‘oriental-flavored exotic character’ (“carácter exótico de sabor oriental”), and Juan Luis Alborg (writing in 1970 in the US but publishing in Spain) says that Shem Tov’s style is ‘unique to Hebrew literature’ (“peculiar de la literatura hebrea”), and, it follows, out of place in Spanish literature.

Américo Castro

In exile from Franco’s Spain, Américo Castro, whose controversial theory of convivencia (Spain’s essential Semitic and Christian hybridity) continues to divide scholars of Spanish culture, combines both approaches. For him, Shem Tov is a Semitic and therefore authentically Spanish author. On the one hand, the folksy tone of his Proverbios is ‘Sancho Panza-like’ (“sancho-pancezco”) (1948); On the other, he writes that Shem Tov is a writer who ‘gazes steadily toward the East, and not toward Christian Europe’ (“sigue sigue mirando hacia el Oriente, y no a la Europa cristiana”) (1952).

The debate over Shem Tov’s “Spanishness” or “Jewishness” is just one small piece of the much larger discussion of the role of Spain’s Semitic cultural history. For those outside of Spain, it is a simple matter to celebrate the accomplishments of Spain’s Jews (maybe too simple at times). But for Spaniards themselves, it’s complicated. There is a lot of history, much of it unpleasant, surrounding Spain’s Jews.

For hundreds of years, Spanish identity was not simply about being Catholic, but about not being Jewish or Muslim (think about pork everywhere all the time). From 1478 to 1834 there was a government agency (the Spanish Inquisition) whose only job was to enforce this identity. And despite various experiments in religious freedom during the late 1800s and early 1900s, Spain did not disestablish official Catholicism until 1978. Given this history, it is logical that there would be some ambivalence in embracing Sephardic culture as part of the national heritage.

Nowadays, some thirty years after Franco, things have changed a great deal. In 1992, King Juan Carlos officially welcomed the Sephardic Jews to apply for fast-track citizenship along with Latin Americans, Filipinos, and other ex-colonials (but not Muslims descended from those expelled from Spain). There has been a bit of a Renaissance of Jewish life in Spain, and the numbers of Jewish immigrants to Spain from North Africa and elsewhere have been bolstered by a slow stream of Catholic Spaniards who have converted to Judaism.

The Jewish ‘question’ in Spain continues to be lived and debated, and part of this process is an ongoing rethinking of the role of Spain’s Jews in the story of Spain’s history. Shem Tov’s Proverbios is not widely read by Spaniards today. He does not generally show up in high school literature classes, and there are no popular editions of the Proverbios for sale in bus-stop kiosks. His book may never gain wide appeal, but it will be interesting to see if and how Spanish readers return to him and to other Iberian Jewish and Muslim authors as they continue to rethink their nation’s cultural heritage.